A communication plane, such as a backplane or a mid-plane, of an electronic device includes a plurality of slots that are interconnected with transmission lines (e.g., traces or paths) formed on or within the communication plane. Each slot receives a communication card, and the communication cards communicate with one another via the transmission lines.
For high data rate communication, there is a practical limit to the length of the transmission lines of the communication plane without affecting transmission quality. For instance, insertion loss of a transmitted signal is a function of the length of the transmission line. If the transmission line to too long, the insertion loss may corrupt the transmitted signal to a point that a receiving card is unable to properly reconstruct the transmitted signal. As a result, there is a practical limit on the size of the communication plane within the electronic device.